The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life (9 page)

In fact, by all appearances, it feels quite natural. Just ask Fergie, one of the lead vocalists for the hip-hop group the Black Eyed Peas, who, upon reflecting on critics’ rather sour reaction to some of her recent performances, fired back, “Singing is a gift from God, and when people say I can’t sing, it’s kind of like insulting God.”
²⁶
The Fox television correspondent and political pundit Bill O’Reilly feels similarly as though his career were tailor-made by God. O’Reilly believes that God personally crafted his bare-knuckle debating skills, cutthroat journalistic style, and generally feisty persona especially for this self-proclaimed “culture warrior.” In O’Reilly’s autobiography,
A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity
(2008)—an unwieldy moniker given to him in the third grade by what he looks back on now as an especially perspicacious nun—O’Reilly sees a benevolent thumbprint in his rags-to-riches story:

If the universe had a sense of humor, we would find the deistic ghost of Charles Darwin as a guest on
The O’Reilly Factor,
staring bewilderedly at O’Reilly as the latter struggled to make his case in a red-faced tête-à-tête about the meaning of life. But because it doesn’t, we can just use our imaginations. And fortunately, it’s not a huge stretch to imagine what Darwin would probably say either. In a letter dated July 3, 1860, and written to his close confidante (and religious apologist), the botanist Asa Gray, Darwin opined,

The idea of destiny and essential purpose might seem harmless enough, but applying teleo-functional reasoning to our personal being can sometimes go monstrously awry too. For instance, it’s arguably one of the core tactics employed in luring unsuspecting young military recruits into dangerous service. Nobody in his right mind would believe that God created him for the purpose of hideously maiming an arthritic grandmother or that God designed him, and him alone, especially for flaying the flesh off a cooing baby’s tender skeleton with homemade shrapnel. Yet the teleo-functional brain sees things in a curious way. Suppose you’re a young Muslim whose neurons have been bathing in the rich, sensory atmosphere of warfare, radical Islam, and instability from the time you were gastrulating in the womb, from which you shimmied out into a world of baroque violence where the staccato sounds of Apache helicopter blades has become as familiar to you as your mother’s voice. Handpicked by a charismatic political leader, whose particular God, orthodoxy, and history you happen to share, you’re told you’ve been specially chosen, as God’s will, to carry out a secret and holy act of martyrdom for all of Islam. Yes, the shrapnel you’re brandishing will destroy a poor arthritic old woman and obliterate an infant who happens to be in the crowded marketplace where your destiny is to be played out, but all is as it should be. “God works in mysterious ways.”

What’s important to notice here is how teleo-functional reasoning, when applied to this strange quest to uncover the purpose of our lives, can lead to acts of epic devastation when the socioecological conditions are just right—or, rather, just wrong. The trouble is that the terrorist doesn’t think he’s a terrorist, for God doesn’t create terrorists. In 1997, Osama bin Laden, who was already cooking up his egomaniacal plans for his own political ascendancy in the Arab-speaking world, granted a rare interview to an American television reporter, who asked Bin Laden about the increasingly frequent, disturbing strategy of training radical young Muslims to blow up themselves and others in service to Al-Qaeda. Bin Laden responded, “We believe that no one can take out one breath of our written life as ordained by Allah. We see that getting killed in the cause of Allah is a great cause as wished for by our Prophet.”
³⁰
So playing on the idea of destiny, teleo-functional thinking can be an insidiously effective trap, abused (either intentionally or unintentionally) by authority figures in their narcissistic manipulations of subordinates. According to one chilling study of Palestinian children, 36 percent of boys and 17 percent of girls between the ages of twelve and fourteen said that they wanted to die a martyr.
³¹

This isn’t to say that the concept of destiny—or believing, more generally, that God has something specific in mind for us as individuals—is always such a bad thing. In fact, research by Northwestern University psychologist Dan McAdams suggests that people who attribute meaning to their misfortunes tend to become sympathetic older adults, prone to lending a hand to younger individuals who are still going through their own painful “life lessons.” Indeed, when now-President Barack Obama was campaigning for the Illinois senate in 2004, he was interviewed by Cathleen Falsani, a religion columnist for the
Chicago Sun-Times
. Falsani was collecting stories for her book
The God Factor
(2007). When she asked whether he ever prayed or meditated, Obama replied:

As we’ve seen, consciously rejecting the idea of destiny doesn’t mean we’ve stopped portraying ourselves as characters in some shadowy personal fable. But understanding destiny for what it is—a cognitive illusion that, given the naturalness of both human egoism and theory of mind, can be both alluring and deadly—we’re at least able to resist those unctuous figures that would corrupt us into believing they possess some privileged knowledge about what God has in store for us.

And it’s not just warmongers and religious con artists that tempt the young and gullible into unwise fatalistic thinking either. In fact, although their intentions are usually more innocuous than the foregoing, parents and teachers also tend to unwittingly exacerbate the illusion of destiny. Our social environments are blanketed by a thick vocational wilderness in which one’s job title serves, often sadly, to identify the essential purpose of that individual. From the earliest ages, children are asked by adults “what they want to be” when they grow up, as though one is not a real person—that is, is
without essential purpose
—until one has a career that serves a function.

As a college professor, I’ve seen my share of students for whom the future represents an enticing and inscrutable promise, one that they might divine here and there in the form of others’ praise or recognition of their talents. We expect young people to “discover themselves,” like sleuths working on a case. An implicit assumption in this lock-and-key approach to education is that, with enough self-knowledge, and especially with enough failures and rejections by trying their fit in too many wrong doors, students will eventually find the door that gives them the least resistance, thus realizing what it is they are “meant” to be doing with their lives. Standardized testing is used as a process of elimination, allowing students to whittle down their fates. And for students who read their test results like tea leaves, or take critical evaluations of their potential as inherent truths, this approach often means sacrificing their possible best future selves.

Furthermore, after “seeing” their prewritten purpose, people are prone to feeling cheated, as though they are “living someone else’s life” or “not doing what they’re meant for” when they find themselves later shackled to the utilitarian realities of having to pay the bills, raising their children, and honoring their rather drab and unromantic commitments. My father, a successful salesman, earned his undergraduate degree in English literature and always felt—largely because of comments from one supportive faculty member during his college years—that he was meant to have been a tea-sipping professor romancing wide-eyed students about Robert Frost on some idyllic liberal arts college campus. But, it didn’t quite happen that way. Like Franz Kafka stuck in the mole holes of a labyrinthine bureaucratic absurdity, he instead spent his entire adult life selling wood glue to wholesale suppliers and chairing soporific board meetings on how the present market conditions were affecting the sale of home office goods.

The teleo-functional bias may also influence our self-esteem in subtle, but potentially life-altering, ways. Even for those who believe that “God doesn’t make mistakes,” our interactions with other people can still sometimes instill in us the vague, unsettling sense that we are human design flaws. When we think about the child who’s told everyday by his mother or father that he’s useless or “can’t do anything right,” an evolved cognitive penchant for reasoning as though we’re artifacts can turn rather tragic. And this sort of strangling effect of teleo-functional reasoning on our self-esteem doesn’t necessarily require verbal abuse either. Sometimes it’s simply a matter of vicarious learning—learning from the experiences of ostracized others what it is that society feels makes a person defective, and then hiding this part of our own nature so as to avoid the same stereotypical, much maligned destiny.

It’s a bit embarrassing for me to recall now, for instance, but when I was about eight years old, I was convinced that a routine bloodletting at the doctor’s office would expose me as being secretly gay—that, perhaps by holding the vial up to a ray of sun-filtered light, the doctor would surely detect some homosexual essence floating about in my plasma that would betray my true identity, which was vaguely rotten, a design flaw. The reason I believed this was that I had seen how gay men in my society were treated with disdain, and in fact this was the reason it took a very long time for me to overcome my own antigay prejudices. I was so busy avoiding the fatalistic “story of a gay man” that had been scripted for me by my own homophobic culture, that instead of investing in my own development as an individual person, I invested too much energy in avoiding that already authored destiny of a derogated class.

Research on a related problem in the domain of thinking about artifacts—a problem called “functional fixedness” by developmental psychologists—shows just how detrimental to our personal growth teleo-functional reasoning may actually be. This work on functional fixedness suggests, at least indirectly, that viewing ourselves as having an essential purpose can shape our self-concepts in ways that make us complacent to our less-than-desirable present realities. Direct research on this topic has yet to be done, but if we do indeed reason about ourselves—or at least our purpose in life—much in the same manner as we do for artifacts, such reasoning may well be why our self-concepts are especially vulnerable to what others tell us we are. It may also be why it’s so difficult to reinvent ourselves by seeing our own unexplored potential, instead of complacently telling ourselves that if it’s meant to happen, it will happen.

Functional fixedness is a cognitive bias, found across human cultures, in which our ability to “think outside the box” when dealing with an artifact is severely hampered by the most obvious and apparent function of that artifact. In other words, our ability to generate fertile, atypical, creative insights into the multitudinous uses of a given object—such as a lampshade being turned into a cowboy hat, or a defunct gravestone into a decorative walkway—becomes increasingly constrained by what we believe the designer of that object intended it to be used for.

In one revealing experiment on functional fixedness by Tim German and Clark Barrett, for example, participants heard about a pair of friends, Bear and Rabbit, who were out playing but suddenly became separated by a fast-moving river (which the experimenter indicated by sweeping his hand across an area of the table before the participants, with the characters separated by a pair of Styrofoam blocks). It was too dangerous for either to swim across, said the researcher, but nevertheless Bear had a couple of handy objects that could be used to help his friend Rabbit get back to the other side—namely, a cup filled with rice, a spoon, a smaller plastic cup, a popsicle stick, a Ping-Pong ball, and an eraser. There were two groups of participants in this study. Each heard exactly the same story and was confronted with exactly the same task—to help Bear help Rabbit get across—but one group was presented with the spoon
inside
the rice-filled cup, and the other half saw the spoon lying on the table
outside
the rice-filled cup. The solution? The distance between the two Styrofoam blocks was precisely the length of the spoon, so the answer was simply to use the spoon to bridge the river. Those who saw the spoon outside the cup solved the challenge significantly faster than those who saw it inside. The spoon-inside-the-cup group was conceptually tethered to this apparent scooping function of the spoon and was forced to first escape cognitively from this purpose-constraining setup.
³³